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Balancing Needles and Cigars

SOMEHOW I always knew my executive pursuits would end with me lying face down on a massage table at Sage Hampton Spa in Wainscott, N.Y., naked except for a towel around my waist, perforated from head to toe by two dozen fine filiform Chinese acupuncture needles, splayed out like a road-killed porcupine beneath the winter moon.

I just never imagined it would all turn on a point called “Stomach 36.”

Mikal Gohring, 59, a veteran acupuncturist with wire-rimmed glasses and a ponytail protruding from an otherwise shaved head, leaned across the massage table, brandishing yet another needle over my left shin.

“Breathe in, and then exhale,” he urged in a soothing whisper.

I did as instructed, hoping for bliss. Mikal had told me that his prescribed respiratory routine would distract my mind from the impending puncture and align my yin better with my yang. But when he jabbed that 25th needle into my shin, my whole body seemed to go into spasm.

“Ouch!” I cried out. “That really hurts!”

“It’s Stomach 36,” Mikal replied. “It’s one of the famous points in acupuncture that influences the functions of your internal organs.”

I shuddered, second-guessing my sanity and my reasons for seeking acupuncture treatment. My ostensible motivation was to quit smoking cigars. Along with the obvious health considerations, there were new financial urgencies. The price of my brand of small cigars had soared to $15 a pack. I was going through at least five packs a week. I simply could not afford it much longer.

“Acupuncture won’t make you quit smoking,” Mikal reminded me. “The only way to stop is just to stop. But there’s an aspect of your being that will realize his time may be limited, and he will rebel. Acupuncture will help you deal with what comes up.”

Moments later, Mikal turned on a DVD of Gregorian chants, dimmed the lights and left me alone to allow the treatment to take effect.

The rebellious aspect of my being, heretofore known to me as my evil twin, Larry, immediately reared his needled head. My first executive pursuit, back in May 2005, reported on a renaissance in cigar smoking prompted by the then-booming economy. Feeling a fellowship with the likes of Sigmund Freud, Arnold Schwarzenegger and James E. Cayne, then the chairman of Bear Stearns, I had proposed four rules of cigar etiquette intended to counteract the antismoking police.

Now we had come full circle, and Larry was totally depressed. Arnold had morphed from a Republican governor of California into a de facto Democrat. Jimmy Cayne had suffered an ignominious fall. There was no such thing as Bear Stearns anymore, no such thing as a Wall Street investment bank, for that matter. Having once gorged on the kind of tobacco-wrapped stimulus packages that Dr. Freud favored, we now had to settle for a series of half-baked Washington bailout plans.

If Larry disdained the idea of quitting cigars, he believed that turning to acupuncture was downright kooky. I begged to differ. According to a 2002 survey by the National Institutes of Health, more than eight million people in the United States have tried acupuncture. It is legal in 40 states, and there are more than 11,000 licensed acupuncturists nationwide, plus another 3,000 medical doctors who practice the art.

Classified as a part of traditional Chinese medicine dating back more than 3,000 years, acupuncture is based on the principle of achieving health by balancing yin and yang, or opposing forces. Two crucial concepts are the qi (pronounced “chee”), often described as the flow of “vital energy,” and the blood, variously described as both a liquid and a metaphorical flow. The goal is to regulate the qi and the blood by alleviating blockages, draining excesses and refilling shortages.

Photo

Mikal Gohring, a veteran acupuncturist, treats Harry Hurt III.Credit
Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times

This spiritually charged plumbing operation relies on inserting needles into a patient’s skin along 14 pathways known as “meridians” that wind across the body. The meridians purportedly correspond to specified internal organs like the lung, the heart, the pericardium, the spleen, the liver and the kidney. But as I discovered in the case of my shins and “Stomach 36,” the insertion points and the corresponding organs do not necessarily occupy the same physical locations.

While many leading Western medical authorities remain skeptical about acupuncture, scores of patients have extolled its apparent effectiveness in treating low back pain, headaches, sciatica, dysentery, nausea and vomiting and certain forms of addiction. One of those satisfied souls referred me to Mikal Gohring, insisting that he could surely help me quit cigars.

Born in New York City, Mikal is a former modern dance student whose career aspirations were terminated by injury. But he always had a passion for the healing arts. Trained in my own native Texas, he has been practicing acupuncture for 25 years. At Sage Hampton Spa, he charged $225 for an initial appointment and $125 per follow-up visit.

Mikal worked on Larry and me for about six hours during four acupuncture sessions spread over three weeks. In keeping with traditional Chinese medicine diagnostic protocols, he began by examining my tongue. He found it to be swollen, pale and scallop-coated, indicating, he told me, a “deficiency in my spleen with dampness accumulating” and a deficiency in my pericardium. He took my pulse for a good five minutes, concluding that I had many blockages in the flows of qi and blood.

“All addictions are tied to some deep lack in the inner self tracing back to childhood,” Mikal informed me. “By taking substances like tobacco, you’re trying to fill in that emptiness. We’re going to fill it in with healthy things.”

Mikal plied me with herb capsules branded “Tobac Off” and “Jitters Away” and a bottle of drops labeled “Addiction Detox.” In addition to perforating my meridians and the “Stomach 36” points on my shins, he pinned the tragus of my left ear, a location that was supposed to be specific to treating tobacco addiction.

By the time Mikal returned to the massage table room at the end of our fourth session, Larry wanted to jump out of my skin and bolt to the nearest cigar bar. I didn’t blame him. Every pore ached or tingled. My tragus felt as if it had been pounded with a jackhammer.

Mikal clearly sensed my agony as he removed the acupuncture needles. “If using acupuncture to quit cigars doesn’t work for you in the present moment, don’t stress on it,” he said. “But do know that your relationship to the habit of smoking cigars will be forever changed.”

I paid Mikal and went straight home to bed. I slept for the next 12 hours. When I finally mustered the energy to arise, Larry insisted on jamming a lighted cigar between my lips. I smoked it, then a second and a third. They tasted as good as they ever did.

“So much for coming full circle,” Larry said, sneering. “You’re never going to stop smoking cigars.”

I had to concede that my evil twin might be right. He knew me much too well. After all, we had come a long way together from Chateau Bow Wow, a k a the Doghouse, to divorce court; from getting a custom suit in Chinatown to donning a clown suit in the circus; from the cockpit of a World War II vintage fighter plane to the kitchen of a four-star French restaurant; from football fields, ballet barres and whitewater kayaking rivers to darkened pool halls and the front door of the Four Seasons Hotel on Inauguration Day.

But even if I don’t quit cigars, my bosses say I have to quit my executive pursuits with this column, the 98th consecutive installment. So I leave you, dear readers, with two words that my late momma taught Larry and me never to forget to say — thank you.